First there was the world. Then the dinosaurs came. From there, somehow we meandered into film cameras. Then on to digital cameras. And then came LIDAR. And today LIDAR itself – with breakthrough innovations in Geiger, Single Photon, Bathymetric and such technologies – is poised for another technological revolution.

Valerie King, the Managing Editor of POB (Point of Beginning) has done an excellent job of explaining LIDAR and its potential in this article. The article is remarkable in its depth and breadth without making it too detailed or too surface skimming.

P.S. I am part of the same team as the Mr. Meade quoted here extensively and in our trips to customers and partners together, he often tries to explain all these innovations to me. And I usually retaliate by asking him a lot of inconsequential trivia 🙂

There are pros and cons of using self-declared data from social media users and trying to understand where fraud might be happening. There are privacy concerns to be dealt with. In my discussions of small sample sizes, it would appear that more people are amiable to data being used to catch fraud rather than marketing or collection and such other purposes. On the other hand unstructured data from social media can often help understand the true “identity” – which is the best indicator of potential fraudulent behavior in a non-face-to-face transaction. Danielle Kucera has pointed here to some interesting possibilities….